What
I try for in my poems is an effect similar to an experience I had years
ago while visiting a touring exhibition of American Pop Art. I was standing
up close in front of a painting of a long, low building that was rising
out of a background of lurid yellow-green. The style was unfamiliar among
the Warhols and Oldenburgs, so I wasn’t giving it careful attention. But
I remember being jolted out of my numb gaze when I noticed a small patch
of flame and smoke over on the far right-hand side of the roof. This serene,
unassuming building was actually on fire—the horror and absurdity of it!
An instant of tremendous surprise and disorientation, at once disturbing
and thrilling; a feeling of being violently reawoken that was delicious
and compelling. I didn’t think to look for the artist’s name at the time,
and only years later discovered it to be Ed Ruscha. The search itself,
though, somehow also became part of that long, mysterious moment.

What
is the motive of light?Birds rise like night from the soil,beautiful wing-made murmur fading,the intake of breathso slight and slurred.

From my mapsthe lake is nameless.The moon seems too heavy,stumbling in cloud.Birds have moved into my armsand are flourishing.The glistening, brittleworld is mine.

Birds fly as the threnody pours.Let them come twicepast my outstretched hand.Let them tangle and listand submergeas day throws downits berries and pearl.

Red

Find
some truly hard people.
Lenin

Leagues apart, and in what latitudes together, in the most forlorn regions of the oceanic city, and here moving softly through the listening crowd, we came and we came and we left our machines at night, and everywhere hidden wires had only to be touched. Class hatred had then just dawned.Cables of denial sped. I remember how the tolling of a bell would flood, the insurrection surely cutting my face. Some high official was thrown into the river, and this became the meshing of the wheels, and when lightning struck that part of the old palace, all the theatres were deceived, or deceived themselves. We were the hired and the depraved, thin and dark and unjust, prepared to burst in that ray of light when it came, hearing nothing and scribbling until the stupid lamp began to smoke. Everyday we had to thieve and dive and take the lifted hand of destiny for a dream. The mud seemed a merciful provision, the village did its best to teach us fear. Or was it the darkness of expectation and secret emissaries who had come the same way? We were shadowy in our own eyes as well, denouncing only when silence failed. Depots, arsenals – we could dare those raids with new extremes of shivering force, and death was just a tremor far down, the master who lies in the heart of the serf. What we were whispering became the clamour, so the cargo of the ship was unseen and not thought of, and we had been carrying impeccable papers, fine ardour among us on our straight path. My wound sparkles at these memories: how victory was so often a collapse, how the pines ran past our sledges like soldiers, and the wind was always pressing on the earth. The very themes were existence and did not dissolve, for the true mind does not need a body for its life, like the bombs, which we knew must come, spoiling the small pleasures they dispensed.

Pursuit

I have not had fortune but I have seen the resplendent
mothsof Daghestan. I have travelled through clusters of their
castlesand found them wingless, lain deep,
like the oak apple. And in Angola I have seen hundreds of butterflies grieving. I have seen butterflies swerve like the fiddle and the
bow. I once heard a boy sing on the deck of a Black Sea steamer,There is a small and fragile bug!The respiration, the pulses of the heart, the beating that bursts the lid
of the shell. In sago I found the weevil itself, and I smelled the perfumesof the males. Often I’ve dreamt
of the wasp’s tumbled journey,the mosquito’s guilt and thrift, how the ant slipped downto haunt the grass, how the hornet left only the skin of my fruit.For insects have a beauty that hurts, and that may even darkenthe sky. They drum with their bellies upon the twig. They havelearned to cleanse their blood with light. I have seen a mantisof a delicate mauve impaled on the flea’s single spine.
I have known the mere segmented grub, and I have shared the earth with lice. In the forests of the Congo, I recorded the
stickiness of swarms. O unforgettable flies of Palestine! O cicadas
of Spainin the year I was born!

Riot
Eve

I haven’t,
thank God, become a perpetrator.I never caused the death of others, though I must utter
these words. I hold myself back, as the shrewd son of my father. I see it like this: a lion will attack a gazelle.

We have one life. Why spend it being feebly decent? We see but one night; we contain others. I ask myself if this path and all those terrible detours were really necessary. There is a reason for everything, and our catastrophe.

Imagine then that a father returns and doesn’t speak about
any of this. He carries me on his shoulders during the long walk in the forest. Imagine a man – so polite, so clean; his swiftness, his warmth, his murderous ideas.

Look, nothing in this world is perfect. This is the condition, now growing darker. History has shown us: the Black Death, the Borgias... I await the real wooden anger that shapes me.

The gardens have roared for days. The wind bends the trees. It is like a sign. I hear of a palace rising. It is just after midnight, and I will obey you.

The
Recidivist

There’s
a long-subdued fire burstingin my erotic medicine chest; the moon in its bruise and limping fiends, and flesh from the palm of the hand I lost.

Atoning dust blows here every day, ancient sunlight cools my sins. Get me out of here, there’s a shortage of coffins in this bitter hemisphere.

Holes
and Stars

I just got my memory back. Few loons and I would live in a corner at the airport, not for the sequence but the agony we had to be in, running off with the money and faking our own deaths. Will technology make me remote? I don’t know where I am, I never know what’s going to happen.

Everything is quiet, stunned yet animated, evolving yet wilting. If I want to read a newspaper, I reach out for it with my hand. Funny how you’ve taken my theory and decided to call it your own. They will be making snow tonight; it will be beautiful and we can afford it. Come quickly, by yourself, bring the negatives.

The
Babys Diamonds

The
turtle in her own hot shell came home without jewels.

The fainting trout was advised not to stumble.

At five a.m. a diver went inafter the baby’s diamonds.

The sea was only its perfect self, red without a qualm.

Goodbye
to Maybe

Of what earthly use is Madame Bovary to me when I am drawn into a situation containing those very elements I should avoid?

Concepts of need are awash in oil dollars, hoax callers are jamming the emergency lines, and the fireworks were my only pleasure all year.

This gesture of putting my hand to my eye alerts the world that I’m still alive.

My heart is empty of all snakes, the game is played and I throw the game away.

I may fall asleep on the railway station platform and dream not totally pastoral dreams.

Like maintenance men clinging to steel, I open my mouth to make this cry.

Marshes

They speak of stridency and of nothingnessand wrap up their shoulders in grey light.I want to walk again in this miry place. I want the fever and fret beneath, though it’s something I forget, like pain.

Sky a tent immaculately pitched and noon’s ghosts are creeping across paddocks. Low, lame winds grow in the rushes— the smoky pool mad in its sleep. I have found earth still adhering. I wait for storms to crack the glamour open.

I don’t know the language of this country. It begins in mists, sombre wild bees. Moss sophistry while I lie listening. Dark snake rumours grave in my ear.

Bio: Emma Lew’s The
Wild Reply (Black Pepper Press 1997) was awarded the Association for
the Study of Australian Literature’s Mary Gilmore Award for a first book
of poetry (1998), and The Age Book of the Year Award: Dinny O’Hearn Poetry
Prize (1997 joint winner). Her poetry has been published widely in various
literary journals and her recent work will appear in a chapbook (Potes
& Poets, San Francisco 2001). Emma’s poetry appears in Calyx: 30
Contemporary Australian Poets (eds. Michael Brennan and Peter Minter,
Paper Bark Press 2000), Australian Verse: An Oxford Anthology (ed.
John Leonard 1998) and in the forthcoming anthology New Music: Contemporary
Poetry (ed. John Leonard, Five Islands Press 2001). Emma lives in
Melbourne.